Bigin by Zoho CRM vs. Shared Contacts for Gmail

Startups Needing Quick Setup with Low Overhead
Startups that need a CRM quickly and don’t have the time or resources to onboard heavy tools can set up Bigin in a matter of hours. It covers all the basic CRM needs out of the box, making it ideal for teams just getting started.

When working with several people at the same time, being able to access the full directory [with Shared Contracts for Gmail] makes things 100% easier. Provides a faster look at the company wide directory and grants access to contact whoever is needed. Now if its a company like mine; merged between two, sometimes it becomes a little complicated, due to the fact that it doesn't recognize some email domains (outlook based) and can cause problems sometimes when sending emails (you get an undeliverable email response, and sometimes the emails do get send and other they don't). And they won't pop-out as easy as a recommendation. First you would get the gmail based email and then the 'outsider' email.

Incentivized

• Zero-friction onboarding
• Imported 200 Google-Sheet leads in under 5 min via copy-paste wizard; field mapping was drag-&-drop, no CSV-headache.
• Email templates – yes, but the editor is limited.
• Merge-tags work, yet you can’t drop in advanced HTML; our logo had to be linked from an external URL. On the plus side, a bulk send of 25 emails went through without a hitch and none landed in spam – big win for us.
• Reports – fast but shallow.
• The dashboard quickly shows “deals closed” and “average stage duration,” yet you can’t pull conversion rates by lead source without digging into an export. Good enough for the board, too thin for an analyst.
• Automation – paywalled only.
• We wanted Bigin to auto-send a survey when a deal moved to “Won,” but workflows are a paid feature. You can test them during the trial; once it expires it’s back to manual clicks.

Incentivized

• It has helped us save a considerable time.
• A simple way to share your connection with other Gmail users.
• It provided us with a centralized contact list that anyone could use instantaneously.
• The ability to share connections encourage you to have everyone's contact information at your fingertips without having to look them up.

Incentivized

• I would like to link the same contact to more than one company.
• I would like to be able to use only the name field, but I need to use first and last name
• I would like to have a plan where there is no limit on the number of customizable fields

Incentivized

• I have been looking for a way to share our contacts within our organization for a while now. This process really improves how we were doing it within Google Sheets.
• My only negative is that it has taken so long for it to be functional within Google.

Incentivized

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Incentivized

Bigin has really helped us with selling our monitoring services to our customers, which is primarily farmers in the UK. We often need to talk to customers before, during and after a sale, and Bigin helps us keep our contacts and leads organised as we track all these interactions. We recommend it very strongly

Incentivized

The support is all international and it takes a while to get support as you have to go through chats and set up times, not as easy to just call and get the support you need. They are very nice when you do finally connect with someone and they are knowledgeable, just challenging being international sometimes.

Incentivized

Simplicity, usability, and a modern, intuitive UI.
Easy to learn and simple to guide customers through. Flexible enough to fit diverse business scenarios with seamless integration. Enables managing marketing, operations, customer service, sales, and even assets all in one place. Smooth connections with external services.
Delivers huge value at a fair price.

Shared Contacts for Gmail is amazing to use when you need a lot of contact information on the go. If there's a medium level organization that needs a contact network that is easily accessible for remote work. I wouldn't recommend this for organizations whos works are based on leads and immediate revenue.

Incentivized

• Reaching more possible customers quickly and with less effort. The fact of being able to automate sending to our contact database, which has previously been tagged and categorized, has allowed us to send information in a more agile way (previously we simply used Outlook, without any type of automation).
• Automatically consulting all the email history you have with any of the contacts has allowed us to be more efficient and avoid duplication in communications.
• The process of implementing and integrating Bigin in our company, although it was not difficult, we found some difficulties to synchronize the database loaded in Bigin by Zoho CRM with our Office365 account.

• Ease of contacts syncing across various device types helped minimize the tech support calls into our helpdesk
• Easy to use/self-help tutorials helped minimize the need to train end users
• Helped standardize the platform for the targeted business units